“Sort of,” Sam admitted.

“That’s cheating!” I exclaimed.

“There’s nothing in the rules against it.”

That’s Sam. As far as he’s concerned, rules are made to bend into pretzels. And looking up at his grinning, freckled face, I just knew he was already thinking about some new scheme. That’s Sam Gunn. Unlimited.

HIGH JUMP

When the human race begins to expand its habitat through the solar system, it won’t be only scientists and engineers who go to other worlds. There will be entrepreneurs like Sam Gunn and Dan Randolph, visionaries like Chet Kinsman and Jamie Waterman, saints, sinners, pilgrims, adventurers . . .

Adventurers. Some people make adventure their business. And what a business opportunity the hellishly hot surface of the planet Venus will be!

The things a man will do for love.

I had been Hal Prince’s stunt double for more than five years. To the general public he was the greatest daredevil that ever lived, the handsome star of the most exciting adventure videos ever recorded, the tall sandy-haired guy with the flashing smile and twinkling eyes who always did his own stunts.

Well, I had known him when he was Aloysius Prizanski, back before he got his nose fixed, when he’d been a wannabe actor hungry enough to jump into a pool of blazing petrol from the bridge of an ocean liner.

Back then he did his own stunts, sure enough, but once he got so popular that he could command half a bill just for signing a contract, the insurance people insisted that he was just too goddamned valuable to risk.

So I did his stunts. His old pal. His asshole buddy. Ugly old me. It was no big secret in the industry, but as far as the general public was concerned, it was Handsome Hal himself who’d risked his own neck riding the hundred-gee catapult at Moonbase into lunar orbit and sledding down the dry-ice-coated flank of Olympus Mons in nothing more than a Buckyball suit.

To say nothing of skydiving into Vesuvius while it was boiling out steam and the occasional blurp of hot lava. That one cost me three months in a burn recovery center, although I never let Hal know it. He thought I’d just gotten miffed at him and taken off to sulk.

Now I was going to do the high jump for him. On Venus, yet. Pop myself out of an orbiting spacecraft and drop all the way down to the planet’s red-hot surface.

And I mean red-hot. The ground temperature down there is hot enough to melt aluminum. The air pressure is almost a hundred times what it is at sea level on Earth; like the pressure in the ocean, more than a kilometer down.

And by the way, Venus’s air is almost all choking carbon dioxide. The clouds that cover the planet from pole to pole are made of sulfuric acid. And they’re filled with bugs that eat metal, too.

The stunt was to jump from orbit and go all the way down to the ground. I had just come back from the patch-up job after the Vesuvius barbecue. Truth to tell, I was scared into constipation over this stunt.

But I didn’t tell Hal. Or anybody else.

We all have our little secrets. My doubling for him was Hotshot Hal’s secret. But I had a few of my own, too.

Angel Santos doubled for Hal’s female co-stars; if it weren’t for her toughness and quick thinking I’d have been fried inside old Vesuvius.

Angel was really beautiful: a face to die for, with big wide-set cornflower blue eyes, full bust, narrow waist, long legs—the works. Don’t strain your eyes looking for her in any of Hal’s videos, though; like me, she was strictly a stunt double, wearing whatever wigs and rigs that were necessary to make her look like Hal’s female co-star—whoever she happened to be.

Angel could’ve been a star in her own right, but she had absolutely no interest in acting. She was hooked on the challenges of danger, just like me. We got along together great, two of a kind. She made me feel really good about myself, too. People looked up from their dinners when I walked into a restaurant with Angel on my arm. I mean people never looked at me. Especially when Heroic Hal was anywhere in sight. Okay, I knew they were looking at Angel, not me, but I got respect for having her on my arm, at least. Boosted my machismo rating with the dumbshit ordinary folks.

But once Angel met with Hedonistic Hal she got hooked on him. I didn’t realize it at first. We’d all go out together, the three of us. It didn’t take long, though, before they started going out without me, just the two of them. I was left out in the cold.

Then came the Venus jump.

I was thinking about packing it in. Let Hal the Heartbreaker get somebody else. He wasn’t thinking about me at all anymore; he only had eyes for Angel. And she clung on him like he was the last lifeboat on the Titanic. She wasn’t even involved in this Venus stunt, it was my trick alone. But she came along for the ride, all the way out to Venus—with Hal the Hunk.

But then I decided I’d do the stunt, after all. I wanted to be noticed; I wanted to break the lock the two of them had on each other, and the only way I knew to do that was to go through with the toughest, most daring and dangerous stunt that’d ever been tried. Admiration, that’s what I was after. I wanted to make their eyes shine—for me.

The High Jump: from Venus orbit all the way to the ground. And back, of course. None of the publicity flaks even mentioned the return trip, but I thought about that part of it a lot.

Okay, so we’re in orbit around Venus—Hal, Angel, me, our crew of technicians and our tech directors, plus the ship’s crew. We had decided to keep the ship’s crew in the dark about me doubling for Hal. As far as they were concerned I was just another techie. The fewer people outside the industry who knew about my doubling for him, the better.

So Hal’s doing the mandatory media interview, all dolled up in a space suit, no less, with the helmet tucked under one arm. Standing there by the airlock hatch, he looks like a freaking Adonis, so help me, a Galahad, literally a knight in shining armor. And Angel’s right there beside him, hanging on his arm, gazing up into his sparkling green eyes as if she’s about to have an orgasm just looking at him.

The media people were all back on Earth, of course. We didn’t want them on the ship with us, too much of a chance of them finding out about Hal’s little secret. Since it took messages more than eight minutes to travel from them to us (and vice-versa) they had prerecorded their questions and squirted them to us a couple of hours earlier.

Now Homeric Hal stood there like a young Lancelot and spoke foursquare into the camera, replying to each of their questions after only an hour or so to study the lines his publicity flaks had written for him.

“Yes,” he said, with his patented careless grin, “I suppose we could use computer graphics for these stunts instead of doing them live. But I don’t think the public would be so interested in a computer simulation. My fans want to see the real thing! It’s the unexpected, the element of danger and risk, that excites the viewers.”

The next questioner asked why Hal was so eager to risk his beautiful butt on these stunts.

He did his bashful routine, shrugging and scratching his head. “I don’t really know. I guess I got hooked on the excitement of it all, and . . . and . . .”

He hesitated, as the script required. I thought sourly that what he’s really hooked on is the money. Mucho bucks in this game. He let me take over the dangerous part of it easily enough.

“. . .and . . . well I guess it’s the thrill of taking enormous risks and coming out alive. It makes your heart beat faster, that’s for sure. Gets the old adrenaline pumping!”

His adrenaline was pumping, all right. But it wasn’t about the risks of the Venus jump. It was Angel, draped over him and drinking in every syllable he uttered.

The media interview ended at last. Hal’s smile winked off. “Okay,” he said, starting to peel off his suit. “Let’s get to work.”

To his credit, Hal gave me a farewell hug just before I stepped into the airlock. It was an awkward hug, with me in the bulky thermally insulated space suit that we’d had specially built for this stunt.

“Take care of yourself, pal,” he said, his voice gone husky.

“Don’t I always?” I said back to him.

I stepped into the airlock and turned around to face him again. And there was Angel, right beside him. I blew a kiss as the hatch closed and sealed me in—not an easy thing to do from inside my heat-proofed helmet.

There were two technicians already outside, in space suits of course, to help click me into the aeroshell. It wasn’t a spacecraft, just a heat shield that carried the bare minimum of equipment I’d need to make it down to the surface. I mean, that Humphries kid had reached Venus’s surface a couple of years earlier, but he’d never walked on the planet’s rocky ground, as I was going to do. He’d been inside a specially designed submersible; it touched down on the surface, not him on his own two feet. And he was supported by an even bigger ship that cruised a few kilometers above him, at that.

Plus, he’d landed in the highland mountains of Aphrodite. It’s only four hundred degrees Celsius up there. Big deal. I was going down to the lowlands, where it’s four-fifty, minimum, and doing it without a ship. Just me in a thermal suit and a handful of equipment.